Google Gets Generous, Settles Suit

It took three years, but the Association of
American Publishers (AAP), the Authors Guild, and Google finally resolved
a highly publicized dispute about copyright and intellectual property law by
agreeing on a $125 million out-of-court settlement that would seem to benefit
all parties involved.

The agreement, which was announced late last October but
still needs the final approval of a federal judge, is a creative solution to a
complicated standoff that began in September 2005, when the Authors Guild sued
the world's most popular Internet search engine over its plans to digitally
copy and distribute copyrighted works without permission of the copyright
owners. The AAP,
representing Simon & Schuster, Penguin USA, John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill, and
Pearson Education, filed a similar class-action lawsuit a month later. Both
suits effectively argued that the Print Library Project—Google's effort, launched
a year earlier, to scan millions of books from three university libraries, an
endeavor that later grew to include Google Book Search, a nonacademic program
currently offering around seven million titles for public preview—is a
violation of publishers' and writers' copyright protections. As AAP president Patricia
Schroeder said at the time, "Google is basically trying to rewrite the
copyright laws that have been on the books forever."

Google countered that its digitization of books constituted
"fair use" because the copyright had expired on many of the texts, which were
therefore in the public domain, and because only a portion of any text—even if
it is still under copyright—can be viewed at one time. "The concerns were that
there were copyrighted works that were being scanned and put on the Web in the
form of snippets," says Authors Guild president Roy Blount Jr. "Google said it
was only going to show snippets, but there was no definition of what a snippet
is. One man's snippet is another man's big old chunk."

Under the terms of the recent settlement, Google agreed to
get permission from whoever holds the rights to a book before digitizing it. In
order to do this, Google will spend more than thirty-four million dollars to fund the creation of an independent
nonprofit entity, the Book Rights Registry, that will serve to locate copyright
owners, obtain permissions, and distribute payments earned through online
access provided by Google.

Google will continue to offer previews of a limited number of
pages of copyrighted works, but only works whose rights holders have agreed to
participate in the program. Readers will have the ability to view the complete
work online for a fee; the rights holder may set the price or allow the price
to be set according to a Google algorithm. Google will also launch an
institutional subscription program open to academic, corporate, and government
organizations, which will offer full access to copyrighted out-of-print books.
(Public libraries will be offered subscriptions for free.) In addition, the
settlement allows Google to implement new services such as print-on-demand and
individual subscriptions.

At least forty-five
million dollars of the settlement money will be allocated to authors and
publishers whose copyrighted texts have been scanned without permission. "If
your book was scanned and you own all the rights, you'll get a small share of
this, at least sixty dollars, depending on how many rights holders file
claims," wrote Blount in a message to Authors Guild members.

Google did not respond to repeated requests for an interview,
but in a press release distributed by the Authors Guild, Google cofounder
Sergey Brin is quoted as saying, "While this agreement is a real win-win for
all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of
knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their
fingertips."

"The great thing, of
course, is that these books will be preserved," Blount says. "Presumably Google
is a lot more lasting than paper and ink."

Kevin Canfield is a
freelance writer in New York City.

“Under the terms of the recent settlement, Google agreed to get permission from whoever holds the rights to a book before digitizing it.”

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In October the Association of American Publishers (AAP) filed a federal lawsuit against online search engine Google over its plans to digitally copy and distribute copyrighted works without permission of the copyright owners.